Australian deported by US over pro-Palestine writings: Report

By Berk Kutay Gokmen

ISTANBUL (AA) - An Australian man deported by the United States says border officials told him his removal was due to writings in support of pro-Palestinian student protests, The Guardian reported Sunday.

Alistair Kitchen, 33, said he was en route from Melbourne to New York on Thursday when he was detained for 12 hours during a layover at Los Angeles International Airport. He was questioned by US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers about his political views on Israel and Palestine, before being deported back to Australia.

Kitchen said he was “clearly targeted for politically motivated reasons,” Kitchen told Guardian Australia. “The CBP explicitly said to me, the reason you have been detained is because of your writing on the Columbia student protests.”

Kitchen, who had studied at Columbia University, had previously written about student-led pro-Gaza demonstrations, including an article on his blog Kitchen Counter earlier this year criticizing the arrest of student activist Mahmoud Khalil. He described Khalil’s detention as based on “utterly specious grounds by a neo-fascist state” and claimed it was meant to “facilitate the deportation of dissent.”

Khalil, a graduate student at Columbia, remains in detention. On Friday, the Trump administration said in a court filing it would not comply with a federal judge’s order to release him.

Earlier this year, US authorities revoked the visas of thousands of international students, including individuals allegedly targeted for their involvement in pro-Palestinian campus protests or for publishing opinion pieces critical of Israel. Among them was Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish Ph.D. student at Tufts University.